Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and all major political parties on Wednesday condemned a speech by a minor senator who used the term “final solution” in calling for a revival of a “White Australia” restrictive immigration policy.

In one of the most divisive speeches seen in parliament since 1996 when far-right politician Pauline Hanson declared incorrectly that Australia was being swamped by Asians, Senator Fraser Anning on Tuesday called for a national vote on whether to ban Muslim migration.

Anning said Muslims were responsible for acts of terror and crime and were dependant on welfare. Muslims account for less than three per cent of Australia’s population, census data shows.

Amid national outrage Turnbull, who will head to the polls within nine months, quickly condemned Anning.

“We reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Senator Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all,” Turnbull told Australia’s parliament.

Opposition Labor party leader Bill Shorten told parliament on Wednesday: “You have to be pretty outrageous to be condemned by everybody in the Australian parliament, but Senator Anning has managed to do just this”.

Australians will return to the polls by May 2019, and recent polls show the majority of the electorate back multiculturalism, but far-right politicians are expected to pose a challenge to the mainstream parties.

“Turnbull can and must bat this away,” said Haydon Manning, a political science professor at Flinders University in South Australia.

Anning, who has been in parliament for less than a year has entered into a loose alliance with several conservative independent lawmakers that has boosted his otherwise inconsequential role in Australia’s upper house.

Anning split from Hanson’s One Nation party shortly after being sworn in, though his speech had many of the hallmarks of his former leader who has called for cuts to Asian and Muslim immigration.

“The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote,” Anning told parliament in his maiden speech.

The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide or extermination of the Jews during World War Two. Anning has since said he did not know the history of the phrase.

Hanson joined the condemnation, telling the Senate she was appalled by Anning’s speech.

“We are a multi-racial society and I have always advocated you do not have to be white to be Australian,” she said.

Under what was commonly called a “White Australia” policy Australia restricted non-European immigration from 1901 until the late 1960s using various laws.

A Ukip MEP called for an end to immigration from Islamic countries during a debate on the crimes of ISIS on January 20.

Gerard Batten, who represents London, argued that ISIS represents “a literalist interpretation” of the Qur’an.

Batten claimed that “ISIS represents a revival of the original ethos of the Mohammedan cult”. He defended these comments and told Religious Reader yesterday that “ISIS represents the worst excesses of the Mohammedan cult”.

When asked for further clarification he insisted that his purpose “was not to upset any individual but to talk about a belief system, an ideology”. Batten maintains that “Islam is of course a cult”. A ‘cult’ that “up until relatively recently was properly referred to as ‘Mohammedanism’ in the West’”.

This religious literalism, for Batten, remains antithetical to ‘western liberal democracy’. And drives his desire to end immigration from Islamic countries. As ‘importing millions’ from Islamic countries may constitute a security risk since “we cannot be sure of just how many of them take their religion literally?”

Batten holds little sympathy for men fleeing ISIS. He told Religious Reader that: “Most of the waves of migrants coming to Europe, and queuing up at Calais are not fleeing ISIS, they are fit young men who are economic migrants.

Most of them are not even from Syria. If they are fleeing ISIS then they have abandoned their own parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends rather than try and defend their own people from this threat.”

This ideological framework forms one part of his solution to defeating ISIS. The other concerns warfare. Batten calls for an alliance between western and Islamic nations who ‘don’t want to live under the barbarism of ISIS’.

Batten used his speech to claim that the Qur’an “speaks of making war on infidels, killing infidels, and striking terror into the hearts of infidels”.

Yet there is no concept of ‘holy war’ in the Qur’an, according to Dr Imam Mamadou Bocoum. Dr Bocoum also warns against divorcing the context of revelation from Quranic verses.

Batten, however, maintains that you cannot take Quranic verses out of context as they are the ‘words of Allah’. He claimed that “Mohammed himself had to later withdraw certain ‘Satanic verses’”.

He also called on Christian leaders to proselytize their faith to Muslims in Europe. As it provides the space for a ‘recruitment opportunity’ and ‘ideological crusade’. Batten insists that Christians are ‘frightened’ to promote their faith, but Muslims are not.

Gerard Batten is not without controversy when it concerns Islam or Muslims. In 2014, he defended the ‘Proposed Charter of Muslim Understanding’. The document asks Muslims to sign a pledge of non-violence. Batten had lamented the fact that Europe had allowed “an explosion of mosques across their land“.

He commissioned Sam Solomon to produce the report in 2006. Solomon has shared platforms with the likes of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Geert Wilders in the past.

Batten renewed calls for Muslims to sign this pledge of non-violence a day after the Paris atrocities last January. He justified this position to the Romford Recorder by arguing that the “bulk of terrorists are Muslim”.

In 2011, Batten had also suggested banning halal and kosher slaughter and outlawing Islamic banking.

He spoke at a ‘counter-jihad’ conference in Brussels in 2007. Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Bat Ye’or, Sam Solomon, and Paul Weston, now of Pegida UK, had also spoken at the event. Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller remain banned from entering the UK.

Gerard Batten maintains that he holds no ill-will towards individual Muslims. His interest in the matter remains ‘ideological’.

Batten ends our communication with a quote from Winston Churchill that concerns the ‘regressive’ nature of Islam.

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David Jones (@DavidJo52951945), has over 23,000 Twitter followers and regards himself as a UKIP supporter. A regular tweeter, he has built up a following on the back of his anti-migration and anti-EU tweets. The description on his avatar on Twitter says:

“UK government have abandoned Brits. We need to exit EU, ECHR, stop all immigration + look after British people. Like UKIP. All my views. I follow back – Southampton/ Isle of Wight.”

Not to be outdone on statements after the fire that overtook the Morden mosque over the weekend, Jones went onto state the following:

What Jones showed was his ignorance about the mosque that had suffered the fire. It was an Ahmaddiya mosque and the community has been vocal in raising funds for charities and also recently ran a ‘Poppy campaign‘ in order to raise money for charity by openly selling poppies. This was also highlighted to him as shown above and his response was even more bizarre and telling of his views.

Not to be outdone on the richter scale of ignorance his further tweet shows a level of disdain for Muslims in the United Kingdom. His response was, “I am talking about Rotherham where 2000 underage girls were abused by muslim (sic), UK is better off without Islam and muslims.”

Finally, we are aware that this individual has previously had Twitter conversations with senior members of UKIP before. We hope that they reconsider conversations with this individual given the comments and postings that we have highlighted.

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